Woods Travel celebrated 45 successful years in 2016 with a great number of awards. Now founder Roger Elsmere has retired, and the plan is only to improve
Coach operation isn't an easy business. Coach operation by the sea is even more difficult.
Why? Because half of your catchment area is clear blue water.
Just by being based in the sleepy seaside town of Bognor Regis, Woods Travel has limited its potential customers by half; its clientele radius is half in the sea.
“The smartest business plan would be to move 25 miles inland,” says Tina Shaw-Morton, joint Managing Director. “It would increase our customer base by 100%.”
But that doesn't matter. Bognor Regis is home, always has been, always will be.
“I've always been proud to be in Bognor Regis; to come from here and to work here,” says Tina. “There are no plans whatsoever for us to relocate at any point.”
Three directors
Woods is a very well-respected business, both locally and nationally, and it's had a good year with a raft of awards under its belt – from the National Coach Tourism Awards, the UK Coach Awards, the local Chamber of Commerce and the Arun Business Partnership Awards.
Some of those awards were in special recognition of Roger Elsmere, the company's founder, who retired in 2016 after 45 years at the helm. Woods was started as a taxi business by Roger and his friend Bill Wood, both Londoners who moved down to Bognor Regis, and it had high standards of quality at the centre of its ethos from the very start.
There are three Directors now – all women: Roger's daughters Kristy Elsmere and Tina, who are joint MDs of the Woods Travel side of the business, and Ali Waterfield-Jones, MD of the ABTA travel agency Woods Holidays.
The business operates out of a three-storey Victorian building in the Aldwick area of Bognor Regis, with the ground floor given over to the travel agency; the first floor to operations; and the second floor to holidays and day excursions.
Kristy's main role is the creation and development of Woods’ coach holiday programme, and overseeing the day excursions.
Ali’s is heading up the sales office and travel agency, while Tina’s is mostly compliance across the business.
“It works really well,” says Tina. “The three of us have a weekly meeting to keep in touch with what we're all doing, anything that needs to be looked at, and making sure we've got a cohesive approach to where we're going and that we’re moving forward.”
In his last two years at the business, Roger had taken more of a back seat, so his retirement has been a gentle transition.
Ali studied travel and tourism at college and has been at Woods for longer than either Tina or Kristy, who both had other careers and travelled before putting down roots in Bognor Regis around the age of 30. “All three of us have a very strong love of travel and exploring new places,” says Tina. “I think that's the main reason we all enjoy what we do.”
Woods employs between 45-50 staff – with an equal mix of men and women.
Plan for efficiency
There are no plans at present to get bigger. Instead, all working practices are being examined to see if Woods can do things more efficiently with the same number of staff and vehicles.
That includes investing in technology. Tracking and telematics from Webfleet by TomTom have already been in place for two years, and have proved very useful. Now, CCTV from Synectics is being installed on the fleet, which will help protect the business from spurious insurance claims, badly-behaved schoolchildren, and false accusations levelled at drivers.
Onboard wi-fi is also being considered.
The drive to improve the business goes from upgrading IT to upgrading the fleet, and Tina, Kristy and Ali meet to make sure that’s happening, among their busy day-to-day schedules.
“The idea is to play to our strengths,” says Tina. Woods’ major strength is its coach holiday programme, with 170 tours a year, plus its 300 day excursions.
That’s the core of the business, but “we've got the flexibility to provide transport for anybody, for everything,” says Tina, including school contracts, private hire, clubs and societies.
Marketing is another thing it’s focusing on, and Woods has just relaunched its website, as well as a second website dedicated to the private hire side.
A video from Woods’ open day last year, made by a local marketing company with drone footage, has proved an effective piece of PR and caught the eye of younger travellers – as did a coach tour of Pokémon Go sites last year. The video also “gets across the family-friendliness and the quality of service,” says Tina.
Family look
Vehicle upgrades have been a key consideration of late, thanks to the ever-straitening emissions requirements of London – a big area for Woods. “You don't really think about the fact that your location can have such a drastic effect on the business plan,” says Tina. “Being in the south east makes things much more expensive for coach operators.”
The company usually favours buying coaches that are around one year old, because as well as the price, everything’s bedded in and teething issues have been ironed out – but that market has dried up in recent years.
The last three coaches Woods has bought included one that was a year old, one ex-demonstrator, and one brand new.
It favours VDL Bovas with DAF engines, bought from Moseley in the South or secondhand: Commonality of parts is a bonus, and the family look makes the coaches stand out when there are multiple vehicles on one hire.
Presentation is pivotal: Any damage is repaired as quickly as possible.
‘Small enough to care’
The vehicles are based at a separate site near Arundel, which has a full maintenance facility. The depot watched over by Operations Manager Robert Black, who has recently been promoted from driver.
He’s available full-time for drivers to speak to, as part of the company’s open-door policy. “All the drivers know that if they’ve got a problem they can speak to the transport department,” says Tina. “If they don't feel it's being addressed, they know they can come to me – and they do.
“It's one of the benefits of being the size we are – we have that time to be able to treat each member of staff as an individual.
“That's why quite a few of our staff have been with us for a really long time; some have been here for 20 years.”
She says the business is “big enough to cope, small enough to care” – an ethos that goes out to customers too.
“A good example of our approach is the way our phone systems are set up,” she says. “There’s no voicemail – all customers get to speak to a person, and everybody has basic training in taking calls to cover each other's departments.
“We have to be flexible, and that personal service is one of the reasons we're still here. We’re not automating for the sake of it – it’s important to keep that contact.”
As an example, customers will ask which tours certain drivers are doing, so they can book with them. And some people will drive from Eastbourne to visit the travel shop in Bognor Regis to book their holidays, because they want to see the staff. “It's not a gimmick,” says Tina. “It's how we are.”
Attention to detail
The raft of awards that Woods has won over the last year – including “four lifetime achievements for Dad before he’d even retired,” says Tina – is down to a close attention to detail spanning all of the company’s 45 years.
Kristy says: “It’s got to be down to the level of service we provide, and the fact that it's not just about profit.
“We make the most of being a small company, including individual contact with customers.”
Entering and being entered for awards is an excellent way to see how much the company has achieved, says Tina. It’s similar when she goes out to do presentations about Woods to U3A and WI groups – it helps to put the strength of the business into perspective.
“Day to day, we don't always realise how much we've achieved, or the quality of what we do,” she says. “It gives you a chance to step back and have an overview of how well the business is doing.
“We’re very proud of the business, and of our staff. Without them we wouldn’t have become as successful as we are.”
